MAX 2004: Sneak peak live blogging

Mike chambers introduced this years sneak peak session. The audience is equipped with tons of noise-making plastic saxophones and we’re called to make noise if we like a feature 😉

Breeze (Tom Hale & Peter Ryce):

– What if you never miss an online meeting/conference call? They showed an integration of cell phone notification calls in Breeze. If I got it right, it’s codename is “Bora Bora” 😉 Great idea!

Fireworks:

– Several new features like an improved red-eye reduction, text along free paths etc. Really new is a “Save as…” feature… 😉 Hmm, maybe I’m not so enthustiastic as I’m not a designer 😉

Mobiles/Devices (Christian Peterson):

– Chris demoed some tiny Flash Lite animation and how to use the animations in Flashcast also. Cool stuff! Love to play with that in detail!

Flex (Ely Greenfield):

– “Mr. Flex” 😉 showed several feature of the new Flex 1.5 charting engine. It’s nice to see how fast Flex 1.5 is now and that the chart resizes itself to a given window size! Drag&Drop within the charting engine also works perfectly! Ely just presented live data charting in Flex… That’s a huge one, but I’m quite sure that this is not in 1.5 right now 😉

Knowledge Base and Captivate:

– There WILL BE a knowledge base soon. Unbelievable 😉 They made it. The “somehow-difficult-to-find-content-technotes-area” will be transferred in something completely new…;) They presented a very new structured mechanism to search and find things online.
– Silke Fleischer showed how to record web site browsing from Captivate with recording audio and editing the audio later on. Captivate generates a nice and smooth Flash movie from it.

Dreamweaver (Rob Christensen):

– Some ideas of the next version of DW… a tighter integration of XML and XSLT. Hey, Dreamweaver will not KILL your XML files from the next version on 😉 No it will be able to deal with it and to allow building apps with using XSLT to transfer XML formats. Cooooool!
– A much better integration of CSS layouts for building web layouts.
– There will be a Homesite-like vertical toolbar! 😉 YEAH!
– Unbelievable: There will be code snippets and code shrinking options with a nice tooltip as a mouse-over effect
– The next release of DW will have a zoom tool which allows to zoom in and out in the design view!

Flash (Mike Downey):

– Mike showed some more demos using the Flash Player codename “Maelstrom”. It’s huge how fast this is going to become! Incredible
– “8Ball” brings a brilliant shadowing effect using filters. Totally easy, just klick on “drop shadow” and it’s there… using the property inspector there are tons of new options, blend modes, alphas etc.
– changing the joins of a stroke using a simple drop-down-list. Same with applying a gradient to a stroke.
– an easy way to change the direction of the gradient and applying further effects to it!

Central (Daniel Dura):

– Daniel shows a Flex Amazon Browser and how to have it running in Central – this is available NOW with Flex 1.5 and Central 1.5. Great, you can make use of the Central API for Flex now…
– Central versions which really embeds in the desktop, like with or without the console or transparent windows on your screen. Additionally he showed totally integrated Central apps running on Windows.

CF Blackstone (Damon Cooper):

– Bluescreen 😉 So far to the words of Blackstone being as stable as CFMX 6.1 😉 *g* Damon takes the time to reboot to talk about some new features in Blackstone as Gateways, Multithreading etc. Due to time reasons – no preso..;-(

Now we’re heading for the User Group Reception down in our hotel and after that we’re going over to Mardi Gras World for the Night Event…